Modernity and its discontents : making and unmaking the bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow / Steven B. Smith.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed August 12, 2016).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part One Introduction -- Modernity in Question -- Part Two Modernity -- Machiavelli's Mandragola and the Protean Self -- The Exemplary Life of Ren�e Descartes -- Was Hobbes a Christian? -- What Kind of Jew Was Spinoza? -- Benjamin Franklin's American Enlightenment -- Kant's Liberal Internationalism -- Hegel and the "Bourgeois-Christian World," -- Part Three Our Discontents -- Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: Letter to d'Alembert on the Theater -- Tocqueville's America -- Flaubert and the Aesthetics of the Antibourgeois -- The Apocalyptic Imagination: Nietzsche, Sorel, Schmitt -- The Tragic Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin -- Leo Strauss on Philosophy as a Way of Life -- The Political Teaching of Lampedusa's The Leopard -- Mr. Sammler's Redemption -- Part Four Conclusion -- Modernity and Its Doubles.

Steven B. Smith examines the concept of modernity, not as the end product of historical developments but as a state of mind. He explores modernism as a source of both pride and anxiety, suggesting that its most distinctive characteristics are the self-criticisms and doubts that accompany social and political progress. Providing profiles of the modern project's most powerful defenders and critics<U+2014>from Machiavelli and Spinoza to Saul Bellow and Isaiah Berlin<U+2014>this provocative work of philosophy and political science offers a novel perspective on what it means to be modern and why discontent and sometimes radical rejection are its inevitable by-products.--OverDrive.

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